Mobile devices, such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) have been growing in popularity for many years. As they have grown in complexity, the number of functions they are capable of running has also increased. Now email access is a standard feature on many wireless devices. However, a problem arises in accessing unexpected email in a timely fashion.
The current standard practice is to send a short message service (SMS) page to the device to wake it up. The email is normally compressed and stored within the SMS page. However, SMS messages are short, so it is difficult to encapsulate an entire email in one message. SMS also does not support standard security protocols such as SSL or IPSec. Additionally, SMS is very expensive compared with high-bandwidth protocols. Lastly, this technique does not generalize to 802.11b, Bluetooth, or other non-cellular protocols.
Alternatively, the cellular device may poll for email. In a first case, devices may wake up periodically, dial into a network, establish a virtual private network (VPN) connection and poll for email. This, however, requires an authentication for connection. In the case of cellular data, this can be expensive as almost all the transferred data is for authentication, and not user data. In a second case, the device may simply be left on and connected to the VPN connection at all times, periodically polling for email, much like a wired device such as a computer device does with, for example, a digital subscriber line (DSL) connection. This, however, is not practical in a wireless device as it uses up the power in the battery too quickly.
What is needed is a solution wherein a wireless device may access unanticipated email in a timely fashion without the drawbacks of the prior art solutions.